Teaching photo essays

Report Photo Essays I love interesting photos almost as much as I love a good lab. I know the labs teach more but there is some really unexplored teaching potential in photography. This is especially true with the cheaper digital equipment that is available today.

What our age needs is communicative intellect.

For intellect to be communicative, it must be active, practical, engaged. In a culture of the simulacrum, the site of communicative engagement is electronic media. But what if teachers used multimodal composing as a tool to segue into traditional academic discourse? Would students be able to transfer elements of good writing style from a more inclusive communicative intellect to a variety of writing situations?

Issues, ideas, and discussion in English Education and Technology

In recent years, our uses of technology have been changing our reading and writing experiences. Basic writers clearly inhabit these media-rich spaces and use them constantly. We argue that basic writing curricula can and should embrace the photo essay so that students can use their "natural" media reading experiences and visual rhetoric expertise to develop both technological literacy and academic discourse.

She connects three values that still have deep implications for basic writing instruction today: The genre of the academic essay is not widely used outside the academy.

The photo essay can employ image to represent evocative associations or ideas students are having difficulty putting into words. A shadowed layering in the background of the first picture in a photo essay may really be foreshadowing that has great significance later, like a term quickly used in an introduction that is brought to light more directly in a body paragraph.

There is a grammar and a syntax to imagery. Indeed, as a text-based essay must carefully support a deliberate purpose, an image must be representative of its deliberate function. A photo essay, thus, is a genre of composing that can both simplify and amplify core concepts we teach in basic writing courses.

It is a necessary condition for all figures of speech that they presuppose a basic understanding of grammatical forms and lexical content from which the departure is possible. Figurative variations cannot ignore the grammar of the language inasmuch as any change for a greater effect must respect grammatical possibilities.

Because the basic understanding is determined by the grammar and rhetoric is built upon its fundamentals, rhetorical procedure is also referred to as constituting a secondary grammar.

In basic writing curricula, for instance, style is often categorized as the C-B-S construct Joseph Williams writes about in Style: Clarity, brevity, and sincerity, while useful, also have a tendency to oversimplify the role of rhetoric of style in multimodal texts.

Lanham introduces Analyzing Prose this way: We are taught C-B-S theory for our own writing. Yet when we come to study literature, which a rigorous C-B-S theory would have to revise out of existence, we are taught opposite theory" 4.This bar-code number lets you verify that you're getting exactly the right version or edition of a book.

The digit and digit formats both work. This is historical material, "frozen in time." The web site is no longer updated and links to external web sites and some internal pages will not work.

Teaching the Photo Essay. A picture is worth 1, words.

15 thoughts on “Teaching “A Modest Proposal””

Chase Mielke on September 2, Your students, if they’re anything like mine, Read further for tips and ideas for making photo essays a part of your teaching toolbox. Start With Photos. The RTT blog is jam-packed full of stories from our teachers, advice on teaching and living abroad, tips on job interviews, teacher interviews, photo essays and more.

Photo Essays I love interesting photos almost as much as I love a good lab. I know the labs teach more but there is some really unexplored teaching potential in photography. A comprehensive, coeducational Catholic High school Diocese of Wollongong - Albion Park Act Justly, love tenderly and walk humbly with your God Micah